NOTE: This post is mostly theoretical, but I hope potentially helpful and worthy of discussion.

Over the last few years, and particularly since the advent of Hummingbird, I've noticed Google becoming more nuanced about the content it ranks, even for queries where they don't have lots of data on what users click, what they engage with, what they ignore, and their behavioral habits around a search (related searches, usage patterns before/after the query, etc.).

My theory is that this new intelligence presents a dramatic opportunity for marketers and content creators who can identify the patterns and spot queries where critical questions may lie unanswered.

Historically, much of what we'd see from Google's rankings could be explained through a few big factors:

Links

Domain Authority

Keyword Matching

Relevance

Freshness (and, certainly during Google's partnership with Twitter, social signals)

We know Google's become more complex, but even from 2010-2012, I'd say the vast majority of searches' rank ordering could be explained with elements contained in these broad categories.

Today, I'm observing a lot of rankings that seem to connect with brand signals, user/usage data, and a far more nuanced consideration of links, authority, and relevance, but perhaps most uniquely, and especially in queries that have information-gathering intent, there seems to be a set of ranking signals related to what I'll call "relevance to alternative searcher intents."

I'll try to illustrate this with an example. Here's a query for "
space pen" in Google US (non-personalized with geo-biasing removed):

There's three potential popular "intents" that searchers have around this query.

Those seeking Fisher's branded Space Pen

Those seeking to learn about the oft-repeated myth around the supposedly costly development of the Space Pen by NASA when Russian cosmonauts used pencils

Those seeking the Spacepen framework for Coffeescript

And Google's done a nice job recognizing those unique intents and populating the SERPs appropriately with results to answer all three. Historically I'd have called this "QDD" or "Query Deserves Diversity" (something I
first wrote about way back in 2008).

But actually, I think we've seen an evolution from the raw "diversity" inputs (which, in my opinion, mostly revolved around combinations of click behavior in the SERPs and search modification behavior, i.e. people searching for "space pen" then refining to search for "space pen coffeescript") to a model that has more sophistication.

That more sophisticated model might be better illustrated with this query for "
most flavorful steak" (also Google US, non-personalized, non-geo-biased):

There are multiple intents around this query, but they're far more subtle than those for "Space Pen." Searchers are likely seeking things like a description of the various types of cuts, information about what makes a steak taste better, perhaps some interesting types of steaks they haven't heard of previously or why certain cuts are more expensive than others.

What's remarkable is how Google has made shifts in queries like this in the last couple years. If I performed this query in 2012 (which I'm fairly sure I did, but sadly didn't screenshot), I would have seen a lot more keyword-matching and a much more singular focus on articles that specifically mentioned "flavorful" (or fairly direct synonyms thereof) in the title and headline. Actually, it would look a lot more like
Bing's results (no offense to them; these results are actually quite good, too, just far more keyword match-focused):

Today, from Google, I'm getting a broader interpretation of the true intent(s) behind the use of the adjective, "flavorful."

There's results that touch on expensive cuts of steak, of types of beef itself (like Wagyu & Kobe), on what makes a steak more flavorful, and there's a site showing up (Niman Ranch) that seems totally out of place when you look at the link numbers, but makes a lot of sense as a highly co-cited brand name. For reference, here's a
basic keyword difficulty report for the phrase:

My opinion (and this is pure, unvarnished, speculation) is that Google's using inputs like:

Relationships between words, phrases, concepts, and entities to get closer to an understanding of language and an evaluation of the content quality itself

Patterns detected in how authoritative pieces write about/mention the keywords

Topic modeling that tries to identify terms and phrases that are associated with diversity of opinion and topical focus so there's an element of finding not just useful information, but potentially new and interesting information, too

I don't believe these are overwhelming signals today. Links are still very powerful. Domain authority is still clearly influential. But for a lot of what I'm seeing in the end of the chunky middle and into the long tail of the keyword demand curve, I think there's an opportunity for marketers to perform some content gap analysis and win rankings without needing the quantities of links & authority otherwise required.

Here's my strawman concept for starting out with some Content-Gap SEO (and hopefully y'all can rip into and improve upon it in the comments):

Step One: Identify the keywords you're targeting that fit in the backside of the chunky middle and long tail.

Step Two: Prioritize your list based on the terms/phrases you believe will be most valuable (and remember that doesn't always mean highest search volume).

Step Three: Starting from the top, write down 4-6 types of intent and/or pieces of unique information that you believe searchers might have/want when performing each query.

Step Four: Perform the query in Google, and look through the top 10. Do you see results that answer all of the intent/info types you wrote down? Write down how many are missing (including 0 if everything's already fulfilled).

Step Five: Use your number as a potential prioritizer for the creation of new content or the modification/addition of content to existing pages. Then watch and see if Google feels the same way and begins rewarding you for this.

While this process is speculative and my theories are, too, I will say that I have talked to and emailed with a lot of folks in the SEO field of late who've talked over and over about the surprise they've had from purely content-based rankings and rankings improvements. I might be wrong about a lot of the details, but I'd be willing to bet that there's something new going on in how Google analyzes and rewards pages that provide the right kind of content.

For marketers who can identify the patterns, find the content gaps, and fulfill them, I believe there's opportunity to rank without having to pound nearly the same levels of external links at your pages.

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Comments
58

Great post Rand. It's no coincidence that this is something that we as an agency have been prioritising in recent months, as I'm sure many others have too.

I've seen plenty of new sites with barely any links start to outperform long established sites purely due to the depth of content they're producing to answer specific questions. It's now hugely important to identify the questions searches will need answering when in the 'information gathering' phase of the buying process. With the proliferation of content and the evolution of the SERPs (knowledge graph etc.), a simple search for "smart televisions” for example, is not going to get searchers the results they need, and they realise this just as we do. Thus, searches have become far more detailed and specific - “what is a smart tv?” “can you control a smart tv from another room?”, and so forth.

Identifying these kinds of questions will give marketers a hit list of search-friendly posts/pages to write and a much broader reach within the SERPs = more chance of potential customers landing on their sites. I'm definitely noticing a growing number of clients expanding their traffic through this strategy, when previously they would have had little chance of competing based on link alone.

This discussion will again highlight the apparent 'devaluation' of links by Google, which I'd agree with to an extent. However, I feel links will always add value provided they are of the right quality and of course relevant.

I'm certain that other factors (like content quality) are being given a higher weighting within the algorithm than they have previously, which may well help to level the playing field a little. That being said, it won't be long before the traditionally dominant players in the majority of industries start to identify these 'gaps' to match those sites that may have spotted the 'gaps' first - I'd then be interested to see who ranks highest - the site with the strongest inbound link profile? or the site that filled the 'content-gap' first?

I suspect you're right - I'm already feeling a bias to brands and sites we've heard of in the results, even when the content isn't as well-executed as what may be sitting on page 2. The lesson is pretty clear - be a brand!

And what do brands do... they foster a relationships and ensure they are present through-out the consumers journey. This is where content-gap strategies really start to help; what do they need, why do they need it, whats the barrier and what did they think of it - its all a big messy funnel.

This is something I've definitely noticed doing work on a daily basis in-house too; we're getting a lot of traffic for pages that answer specific travel-related questions in detail without any real "off-site" SEO done to them - and quite honestly, it's as it should be as they're doing their best to provide the best possible content to match the query.

This in my opinion is much better rather than just rewarding people with a digital pat on the back because they happen to have a stronger backlink profile even though they have written an article that doesn't answer the needs of the user any better.

This has been something we've been focused on for the past 2-3 years or so, and it bears repeating: find a knowledge gap, fill it with QUALITY and well-researched/written material, and you'll likely get decent traffic without having to scrounge around begging for links.

Yeah, if you do it well enough, trust me you'll see returns - especially if the content is detailed enough. We've definitely found correlation between longer, detailed content and traffic - we're basically taking what I call the "Apple approach"; not really inventing anything THAT new, just taking existing stuff and making it better/packaging it well compared to what's out there already (read: Apple didn't invent the MP3 Player, but they packaged and marketed the iPod so well it didn't matter).

While it takes longer and a lot more research to produce long-form stuff, it more than makes up for it by ranking without having to spend time doing excessive off-site SEO; we can instead just invest that time into making the articles/pages better which is a win for both Google and the audience's needs.

Sir glad to see you here at the main Moz blog. You highlighted some really good points here and I do agree with your hypothesis about filling the gap. Being the professional SEOs , we have to keep an eye on the possible patterns and should think like a Google instead of only focusing on building links.

I'd like to experiment your stated points but don't you think if we could seriously think before creating a content and ask these questions to ourselves:

will it be useful?

what answers this content is giving?

Do people really like to know about this topic?

why the already present content is on top?

Have we READ the already present content?

I think by analyzing these points we'll definitely gonna find and fulfill the gap as we're providing the real,useful content that Google loves to rank.

However, I actually very often see very little query diversity. Just a few minutes ago I had to find an image of a couple of friends in Google image search. You can probably guess what turned up, right? Yes, 10 pages of pictures from the Friends show. ZERO query diversity :-)

But hopefully, from a searchers point of view, we will see a better query diversity and in that case your theories may not only be valid but also become useful and valuable.

When you dig a little deeper there is always more. Over the last few years when I search for something and can't find it I have been adding it to a list. Right now it's just a list. lol But one day I may go out to seek those rankings.

Something I've played with is location+general phrases where the general phrases can mean a host of things and one of the easiest ways to parse out intent is by looking at the long tail off those phrases.

And I think what this post falls under is optimizing for traffic over conversions if we're trying to account for different meanings, or at least that's what happens if you can't tell if someone is looking at space pens to buy vs NASA. At mid tail, where intent isn't general but ambiguous in the sense it can be parsed into multiple meanings, we're taught to look at informational > investigative > commercial/transactional and there's that correlation path with bulky > mid tail > long tail.

What's good for this intent split in some cases is comparison charts. For example with location+rentals, people can mean condo rentals, hotel/motel rentals, or even car/bike rentals. So for vacations I'd do a weekly condo rental vs hotel/motels (favoring the client's offerings) and then have a "did you mean..." series of links to tourism information related to bike rentals, water ski rentals, with blurbs on that page.

Back in ~2010 I wrote this article - http://www.roguevalleygardener.com/Landscaping-Art... . With very few backlinks to either the page or the domain, minimal internal linking and few social shares, I watched the page rise in the rankings until it was sitting in positions 1-3 consistently for head terms such as "english laurel".

I have done nothing to that page, very little to that site, and simply let it sit (unfortunately) for the past 3-4 years. While the rankings have dropped and fluctuated for that article over the years (but it's almost always been on the first page), it has consistently brought in traffic for TONS of long and mid-tail terms, along with multiple head terms. It's ability to outrank some of the associated sites has been an enigma to me in many ways for a very long time. Especially since none of the other articles on the site have had anywhere near the level of success that this one has.

I believe, Rand, that what you are describing is accurate and that scenarios similar to the example I gave are becoming more and more common. Very, very interesting and cool

I'll also add that a few years ago I used a tool that was a topic model analyzer (I believe...can't quite remember) that was either available here or that russ smith was some how connected to and the page scored a 98/100 at the time I tested for relationship to the keyword english laurel.

Reading through your English Laurel page, and then looking at the other pages that rank well for English Laurel, there are a fair number of co-occurring phrases that would definitely give the page a boost in search results for a query such as [english laurel], though there are definitely some different clusters within those top results that would also pull in diversity within the results..

I've noticed a growing trend by Google towards seeding different results. Call it a shotgun approach, I think the diversity is good and bad. I'm not sure if it will continue this way or degrade back towards the hard and narrow past. It would stand to reason that Google is closely testing with certain SERPs to test UX.

The upside is that if you write good content and don't have an amazing backlink profile you have the potential to be on page one. That seems to be what Moz has continuously championed, great content = great SERP results. Unfortunately it seems to be hit or miss as a theory, but I have written articles that generated content significantly earlier than earlier iterations of the Google algorithm.

Still there remains the problem of cookie-cutter content covering direct targeted, great content simply because of website clout. Google will just have to continue to work that one out, or you can wait years for your backlink profile to catch up enough to the big content whores.

I for one am delighted that you posted this. I have been banging on about the importance of content and the creation of relevant keyword and phrases within the same to garner more respect from all the search engines for years. I have never generated back links as a priority. All my clients enjoy top ranking and this is due to them taking SEO by the balls and believing in me and my advice. To say I am pleased that you have taken the time to drill down into this aspect is the understatement of the decade. Great post, great research and great commentary.

Great insights, Rand! I find this one particularly interesting: "Patterns detected in how authoritative pieces write about/mention the keywords." So if this means that Google's understanding of the intent behind a search query in part relies on how authoritative sites reference the topic, I wonder if this will (over time) train users to search in a way more aligned with big brand messaging. It makes sense with Google's increasing bias towards brands.

Really interesting rand, but I have a question. What will you suggest if you are optimizing for some ecommerce store. You have product pages, categories etc. how will you incorporate different intent in your pages especially products. For example - Samsung Galaxy XX, well users might be want to know price of the phone, features, specs, compare and wanted to buy it and other intents where to buy, best offer, trust, customer support etc. How an ecommerce site fulfills all intent in one page considering I have to also optimize other page propoeries like page title I have limited space to fullfill my user intent. How to do it. I am manly confused in writing titles for product pages where I cannot fulfill all intents.

Excellent sir! You are not guessing. The age of adding the human computer interface as a variable and backing that users integrity based on their social standing has begun. I'm taking advantage. Their is no secret. It's logic. Progression, innovation, evolution, necessity. My applause!

The Google search engine is widely used around the world and the every website owner has the desire to get higher rank in search results. According to Google algorithm the content links, domain authority, keywords are relevant to the website content. Rand Fishkin your article is wonderful.

Good Post Rand, This certainly makes sense as we move ahead and Google starts giving importance to finding better content for long tail searches. This space is unexploited and offers huge potential to the content space as the permutation and combinations here outdo single or two word searches by a long mile.

I totally agree with Ben Wood. Hummingbird changes not only SEO but the quality of services Google actually provide to its users. We could hear from everywhere how Content Marketing becomes more and more crucial to our online presence. But Content Marketing withouth proper SEO and Social Network understandings is just another bunch of words.I hope the rest of the Moz team and you, Rand, are going to encourage more articles like this. Namely in such blog posts you could really learn and start thinking.

Here I have a question, as you noted the intent of queries and based on that suggest to find content gap and fulfill them.. But is it as possible for transactional types of queries as informative queries?

Like For example if one search for "spring apparel trends" then mostly it display eCommerce, and fashion magazine photo blogs... Here is it chances to get rank if I would like to write some interesting textual information regarding these queries?

Interesting observation. Speaking personally, theoretical posts like this are my favorite because they stretch the way I think.

I wonder what would happen is someone experimented with taking all the "intents" from Google's top 10 of a given query and tried to create a single page that covered them all. Obviously sites like Wikipedia do this for "know" queries but it would be interesting to try this approach in an ecommerce setting as well.

It does a pretty good job of showing how phrase based indexing could be used to show diversity in search results. I seriously like the use of co-occurrence of phrases within search results as a machine-attainable way of understanding semantic meaning, and grouping like things together.

Today, I'm observing a lot of rankings that seem to connect with brand signals, user/usage data, and a far more nuanced consideration of links, authority, and relevance, but perhaps most uniquely, and especially in queries that have information-gathering intent, there seems to be a set of ranking signals related to what I'll call "relevance to alternative searcher intents.

I hesitate to use the word "brand" because I think it limits an understanding of the impact of what is going on with the kinds of signals you mention. I would call those entity signals, since a brand is an entity, but an entity can be a lot more than just a brand.

(1) Include words that no longer have to be immediately adjacent to each other to be interpreted with a high level of confidence,

(2) Rely heavily upon co-occurrence of terms and phrases in related query sessions as well as search results (one word might be an adequate substitute for another within a query if both tend to have a lot of the same co-occurring phrase show up in search results for them),

(3) Look at calculated probabilities based upon a range of user data involving search entities (queries, results, click choices, anchors in pages selected for a query, etc.) to determine which pages might result in the highest searcher satisfaction in response to a query.

We are definitely way beyond keyword matching at this point, and understanding how Google is using things like Co-Occurrence from sources like user searches during sessions is really helpful.

Great post, Rand! I've noticed that using a similar level of semantically-rich language (as I call it) that an established authority uses and linking out to these authorities, while also providing very unique, original editorialized commentary, helps big time in moving the needle up. I think these are very powerful signals being sent to Google that you want to become a topical authority. Can very rich on-page content begin to overcome PageRank gaps? I think that's a critical question in this new Hummingbird-era.

Great post, Rand! I've noticed that using a similar level of semantically-rich language (as I call it) that an established authority uses and linking out to these authorities, while also providing very unique, original editorialized commentary, helps big time in moving the needle up. I think these are very powerful signals being sent to Google that you want to become a topical authority. Can very rich on-page content begin to overcome PageRank gaps? I think that's a critical question in this new Hummingbird-era.

As machine learning improves so should our 'Google' experience. Finding information online should, in fact, be an exciting process. Sure, Google will focus on answering our questions as efficiently as possible for now, but eventually it will have to evolve into something much greater than that.

Perhaps in the near future the term 'surfing the web' will come back into fashion. Describing online activity as merely 'browsing' might not do the experience justice.

Recently Google has been working alot in the area of understanding the mind frame of a user putting in a query. This has helped Google give better related data in the searches as the results now tend to match the logic behind the query more than the keyword itself. And the knowledge graphs are a part of this strategy. Providing the nearest related answer at the top (mostly the meaning of the word or the phrase) and then providing the logically related answers in the rest of the page.

Also different queries being handled differently by Google has segregated the whole search process for a better result. For Web masters it has become very important to understand what type of queries could be answered by the data in their websites and how a particular type of query (For eg: queries starting with a 'What' or a 'How' and others like just a single word or a phrase) is taken up by Google for search. And do the same it is always good to keep hunting for new patterns and queries that a prospect might frame.

By extending the search results prioritizing keyword flexibility query match in SERP, google has actually evolved out of the 2010-12 era and that's why abridging the knowledge gap based on the vast amount of query data it stores resulting enhanced user experience.

Great piece Rand, this is exactly what semantic search is about. Thanks to the application of semantics in their algorithm, Google is becoming more capable of understanding intent behind queries and of understanding concepts related to it and how they are connected.

When writing, it is essential to understand all the concepts around your theme and use them in a way that allows Google to easily disambiguate entities and understand their relationships. Although search results are not as "keyword focused" they still work with related concepts. In the "steak" example, all these sites mention steaks and flavor. So no need to focus on "most flavorful" but focus on topics.

Google is getting so complex with it's search logic and releasing it so quickly it is getting hard to keep up with improving the quality of content. I wonder if they are trying to increase PPC traffic or just trying to kill SEOs

Yeah - I mean that the brand name "Niman Ranch" gets mentioned a lot when people talk about "steak," and probably even more when they use adjectives similar to "flavorful" alongside "steak." Hence, Niman is benefiting from being a brand that Google associates with the words. Just remember - this is me speculating!

That speculation seems valid, but it's a little mind boggling though! The co part of co-citation is what is really interesting to me—when to value a brand citation? When should Google ignore it? How could they weigh them?

It seems almost insurmountably complex. In some ways, something like brand citations might be even riper for spam than links ever were. Also, considering Google's aversion to paid links/sponsored content... think of all the sponsored brand mentions out there. Imagine having to filter that. Crazy!

All this reminds of how EGOL speculated (6, 8 years ago or something?) that eventually Google would only weigh content to rank results. Too many signals beyond content are worth considering for that to ever happen, but it is interesting that maybe we're closer to that than we would have thought.

I mean that the brand name "Niman Ranch" gets mentioned a lot when people talk about "steak," and probably even mroe when they use adjectives similar to "flavorful" alongside "steak.

There's no "citing" going on there. There's no two different things citing the same thing there, so there's also no "co-citation". The brand name "Niman Ranch" tends to get mentioned frequently in thesame place as the word "steak". The two words co-occur in the same documents. In your example, the adjective "flavorful" also co-occurs in many of the same documents as "Niman Ranch".If those are high ranking documents for a query such as "Niman Ranch" then Google may start associating "steak" and "flavorful" with that particular entity/brand/product.

Here's the whiteboard Friday from a couple of years ago where you started doing this before.

Do a search for all of the granted patents assigned to Google that include the phrase "co-citation" and then do a search for all of the patents assigned to Google that include the phrase "co-occurrence".

an/google and spec/"co-citation"

an/google and spec/"co-occurrence"

There are 8 that mention "co-citation" and 122 that mention "co-occurrence". The use of "co-citation" involved in those patents is very limited.

While I mention these numbers to show that you are using the word co-citation the way that Google is using the word co-occurrence, those 122 patents that mention co-occurrence are ones that you and your team of people digging through ranking signals should be digging through deeply, because they are filled with great things.

Nice post as always, Rand. With regards to non-personalized, non-geo-biased search results - is the even possible anymore? Even with a new incognito session I still see geo-biased search results. I just assumed they use IP geolocation to geo-bias the results.

Yeah - just use a different country code, then put yourself back in the US with &GL=US, and you should get totally non-biased results. At least, you can type them in from any device in any geo, and you'll see the results in the same order. It's the best way we've found to get unbiased results right now.

Well, I have also noticed this thing and most of us are still coping up from it. Content has become the most important part of SEO as we all know. If the content is good then increasing the visibility of your website becomes easy.